Fun with printers

I manage printers professionally, which we buy from a company, let’s call them „ABC Printers“. The printers are basically Lexmark MS331dn, which have been given a new label.

We bought the printers at the end of 2022 with a 24-month maintenance contract. During this time, I once had a technical problem that I couldn’t solve myself, as all administrative functions on the web front end are protected with a pin. When I asked if I could get this pin, they referred to the maintenance contract, which excludes this.

Today I had the motivation to contact them again, as the maintenance contract expired some time ago. The following phone call:

Me: »I would now like to have the pin so that I can manage the printer myself.«
Employee: »We don't give out these pins because we have maintenance contracts.«
Me: »But the contract has expired.«
Employee: »But we wrote to you about this at the beginning of 2025 and haven't received a reply.«

Ouch. After a few minutes of discussion, he then asked a technician to contact me to remove the pins. It happened, everything was fine.

However, I still had a small technical question about the following printer data:

Time in On-Mode: 43031:52:44
Installation Date: 2022-10-26 

Let’s calculate that: 43031 hours divided by 24 hours divided by 365 days == 4.9 years. Wait, what? The printer had been running for more than 2 years before we bought it?

The ABC employee assured me that they never sell used printers, but couldn’t rule it out with Lexmark. He then contacted Lexmark and received the following reply:

This may have the following reasons:
 * The date-time settings on your printers are incorrect
 * The date-time settings were incorrect during quality control

The date on the printer is set via NTP and is correct. I don’t know what Lexmark’s quality control does. My guess is… yeah, you got it.